Yikes, you say? Feeling like I'm abandoning the show just because the movie blew and the first half of the current (sixth) season has been beyond pathetic and juvenile? Okay, you've got a point, part of that may be true. But really the show has just run it's course. The roots of the show - the country's obsession with conspiracies, is over. The two beginnings of this conspiracy generation, the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 and the alleged crash landing of an alien spaceship near Roswell, New Mexico in 1947, have both been blown open in the past year. In addition, I just feel that the country doesn't believe that if the White House can't keep one intern quiet it can keep hundreds of co-conspirators quiet for over fifty years. It just doesn't make sense.

The JFK assassination, which started the whole decade-long search for "the truth" after Oliver Stone's 1991 film JFK, was recently blown open as a real conspiracy. But the real truth doesn't include any second gunman or anyone hiding on the grassy knoll. It was really just Robert and Jackie Kennedy all along.

At the time it was believed that Robert Kennedy was not interested in the whole Warren Commission because he was overstricken with grief over his brother's death. In fact he was really actively covering up JFK's whole involvement in Castro's Cuba. The hurried autopsy, found by some conspiracy buffs as proof of a second gunman cover up really was just the family trying to cover up JFK's Addison's disease, a rare chronic illness. Jackie asked many of those present at the autopsy not to talk about the procedure for 25 years, many took their silence as proof of a continuing conspiracy. This missing brain matter reportedly was sent to Robert, second sets of photos were taken and developed, as many long has postulated, but really were just less gruesome, sanitized images for possible public release, and not the definitive proof of other entry/exit wounds. The Kennedys' interference over parts of the investigation for their own interests set into action one of the longest conspiracies in history.

Roswell, New Mexico. At one time only Sci-fi geeks and people living in Roswell knew the significance of this small town. Why? It was widely reported that in 1947 an alien spacecraft crashed in the desert out there. When reporting the incident, the local paper printed a story that alien bodies had been recovered from the downed craft. As quickly as you would expect, the government came in and retracted the story, saying that it was a crashed weather balloon. The photos from the Air Force's press conference differed from the newspaper's photos. Stories changed, details obscured. For forty some odd years this was the prime example on the case of the government's top secret cover-up of aliens and flying saucers. And now we know that it's just another case of Cold War politics.

In the 1940s, New York University in association with the predecessor to the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Army Air Forces, started a balloon project that was called Project MOGUL, although the name was so classified that no one working on it actually knew the name. The unclassified purpose of the project was to develop constant-level balloons for meteorological purposes. Its classified purpose was to try to develop a way to monitor possible Soviet nuclear detonations with the use of low-frequency acoustic microphones placed at high altitudes. No other means of monitoring the nuclear activities of a closed country like the USSR were yet available, and the project was given a high priority. One of the NYU tasks was the development of constant-level balloons for placing the acoustic microphones aloft.

From Alamogordo Army Air Field in New Mexico the group launched Flight #4 on June 4, 1947. It crashed and never was recovered by the group. A rancher and sometimes hill-billy, Mac Brazel, found the wreck northwest of Roswell on June 14, 1947, although he didn't take the debris into Roswell until July 7, 1947. From there the debris was taken to Fort Worth, Texas, and then later to Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio.
In every case the debris was reported the same, smelly, smoky gray rubber-like material, shiny panels and small aluminum rings - all of which would be found on NYU's
neoprene balloons outfitted with large radar reflectors.

So the whole Roswell incident springs from a Cold War classified secret, that just snowballed in the imaginations of a sci-fi hungry populace.

Thus as the 1990s come to a close, we are ready to move on. The country has come a long was since 1993, when the "truth was out there". Now the truth is here. JFK was killed by one crazy guy with a gun, and the thing that crashed in Roswell was just a weather balloon, with a little more devious purpose. In both cases the government we feared was actually telling the truth, and we didn't believe them. Today that truth is just the far-fetched fiction.